In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice—a sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night.India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a … becoming a temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world—one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that soon becomes a sisterhood.
But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta’s abduction.
Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta—and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place.
Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship—a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.
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I loved this book. It was such a great story about 2 friends and a misunderstanding. The author really developed the characters and made you feel so many different emotions toward them. I don’t normally read a book twice but this is one that I definitely will.
A well written and interesting story about two girls of a similar age that become good friends when they are young. Tara with a promising future and the other Mukta who was born into a not so privileged life.
This novel deals with the caste system in India, human slave trade and and the hopes and wishes of these two girls as they are brought together in friendship and then torn apart due to horrible circumstances.
Each of the girls as they grow to women have extremely different lives, yet always have the other one in their thoughts.
We travel the path of both, with all of the good and bad of what becomes of their lives, and as they search for each other.
This is a story that will stick in your thoughts.